Large, empty buildings creep people out.
These structures have outlived their intended uses, and sometimes their past realities were frightening in themselves—prisons, mental asylums, abandoned mansions or, in the case of the Kansas City Metro area, former health care technology offices.
After tech goliath Oracle Corp. purchased North Kansas City-grown Cerner Corp. for $28.3 billion in 2022, the firm ceased operating two of its three main campuses: the North KC world headquarters and its Contiguous Campus in KCK’s Legends area, which was just completed in 2013.
Oracle consolidated all of its employees into what is now the sole, 1.6 million-square-foot Oracle Cerner Innovations Campus in South Kansas City. Although there are people working at the 87th Street and Hillcrest Road campus, by many accounts the numbers aren’t high, with most employees working from home.
At one point there were plans to build even more office towers, retail space and data centers at the Innovations campus. Building pads, roads and light infrastructure, created just a few years ago, are overgrown with weeds yet still seem brand new. The Kansas City Fire Department Station 41 sits there all by itself, which is disturbing in a Twilight Zone kind of way.
Hop on Interstate 435 for 28 miles and you’ll see similar-looking massive glass monoliths in Wyandotte County, formerly the Cerner Continuous campus, now sitting empty.
There have been talks of converting one of the two buildings on the 34 acres by the Legends into multifamily units. The site currently sits in silent contrast to its retail and entertainment neighbors, like Great Wolf Lodge and Nebraska Furniture Mart. The stark lack of activity makes the two Cerner office tower shells seem taller than their eight empty stories. “What’s going on in there?”
It’s getting more crowded nearby. A Mattel Adventure Park, complete with Barbie and Hot Wheels attractions, along with retail and hotels, will soon be occupying the 183 acres just to the west and is set to open in 2026. And depending on where your crystal ball leads, a new Chiefs stadium could land in that part of KCK, too.
Back east about 20 miles, in North Kansas City, is Cerner’s former Global Headquarters. It’s tucked up in its business park campus next to North Kansas City Hospital on Rock Creek Parkway, where the company was long based. The main office doesn’t challenge the sky as dramatically as the other two campuses, but it’s empty nonetheless.
What’s scarier than the empty Northland headquarters building and its futuristic metal spire? The prominent Cerner street signage that remains at the campus entrance, suggesting a false promise of a place that once provided livelihoods for thousands but doesn’t exist anymore.
Oracle recently purchased a final part of the vacant North Kansas City campus it did not own, with a 120,000-square-foot demonstration center, the Kansas City Business Journal reported. There’s speculation that the 100-acre campus could have new life in the form of a multi-use project if the property were acquired by another party.
Whatever the plans are, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison spoke ecstatically during a recent quarterly call with investors and analysts about his company’s growing medical technology capabilities with artificial intelligence since the Cerner acquisition.
It didn’t take long in the call before things took a Black Mirror turn.
After revealing that our future electronic devices will recognize us biometrically and won’t require passwords (“We’re getting rid of passwords entirely”), Ellison said that the demand for real estate needed to support cloud computing is exploding. Oracle’s appetite alone commands a tenfold increase in facilities, from the current 162 to between 1,000 and 2,000 locations, he revealed.
It’s unclear if Oracle will choose some of its local infrastructure-heavy properties for those data centers. What we do know is that these server-filled buildings typically don’t require that many employees on site. If the past is a predictor, with that many coming online, a good share of those data centers are going to end up haunted.
